Let us proceed with the supposition that we have before us, at the
conclusion of this war, a period of great national suffering. Such
periods, we have already said, are favorable to the development of
thought. We may add, they are alike favorable to the growth of earnest
purpose. Through suffering we are perfected. Thought and high purpose
are secure bases of noble achievement. If we are not yet prepared to be
inducted into our national mission, through providential favor, then let
us come to it through the inverse method: _through Ulterior and
Reactionary Consequence_.

It may be that we are to endure still more grievous afflictions than
pecuniary and commercial revulsion and depression. Our political
constitution still bears in its bosom, even after Slavery is removed,
dangerous seeds of anarchy and prospective revolution. Within the two
years past, grave mutterings, to which American ears have been
heretofore altogether unused, have been heard in various quarters,
touching the superior advantages of 'strong government,' the speakers,
mostly of the higher or wealthier order of life, meaning thereby, the
old and retrograde forms of monarchy, or something of that sort. Periods
of disaster tend to reveal a latent lack of confidence in the permanency
of existing things. Investigations in Sociology impeach the wisdom of
our institutions, in common with that of all others that have been tried
in the past, from another point of view. Periods of distress and
privation stimulate the turbulence of the 'dangerous classes.' All
national experience reveals, in fine, the existence, in the very nature
of human society, of great antagonistic principles struggling with each
other in mighty conflict, and with which no political or governmental
arrangements heretofore extant have been adequate rightly to cope.

The great and bloody contest with Slavery, now going on, is an instance
of such a conflict; and the fact that we, in the midst of this
nineteenth century, had arrived at the knowledge of no better solution
of it than an appeal to the old, barbarous, uncertain, and terrible
ordeal of battle, is an illustration of the incompetency in question.
Slavery, bad as it is, is the representative of a great social
principle, which, separated from the special mode of its manifestation,
has in it that which is good and right. Mr. Cobden justly characterizes
the great American war as an insurrection of aristocracy against the
principle of